Ecast Shuts Down (Its Jukebox Network)
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
News reaches us that Ecast Inc., a company that we have covered on many, many occasions here on DailyDOOH shut up shop a few days ago and 55 Ecast employees have lost their jobs.
Ecast was one of three companies along with AMI Entertainment Network Inc. and TouchTunes Interactive Networks competing in the digital jukebox space.
While Ecast jukeboxes will continue to operate for a few weeks at least (they store about 150 albums worth of music locally) ultimately they will stop working. We estimate that there are between 6,000 to 7,000 jukebox units in North America at present (it’s going to be good business for AMI and / or TouchTunes who will no doubt vy for clever ways to replace or get these units back online).
An interesting casualty of this (other than the 55 employees) was LG. Yep, that will be LG the Korean display manufacturer.
Not a lot of people know that LG invested heavily in Ecast in 2010 and in typical Korean fashion the company expected the investment to yield significant ‘display sales’ at a much more rapid pace than could be reasonably expected.
After the jettisoning of many of the LG people in early 2011 who were familiar with OOH there couldn’t possibly have been much experience left around the business to help Ecast and it’s probably not a surprise that the other investors and board were not willing to not sink any more money into the jukebox business.
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